Razer Core looks like the graphics card shell we’ve been waiting for
Razer made a big splash at CES this year with a competitively priced, aggressively priced $999 Ultrabook that would put the rest of the laptop market back on the hook. But they’re a gaming company, so they have a reason to go with the new Blade Stealth laptops, and they do: a graphics dock that can handle any dual-slot GPU, deliver up to 375W of juice, and go with USB Type C Transfers its data to the laptop at 40 Gb per second. Even better: it’s probably compatible with any laptop with a Type-C Thunderbolt port.
Here’s a little story about CES: In January 2012, I huddled in the corner of a hotel suite with now Deputy Motherboard Editor Matthew Braga to see a prototype graphics card dock that promised something exciting and new: it The new Thunderbolt connector and its staggering 10 gigabits per second of bandwidth will turn a less powerful laptop into a gaming desktop. I can’t remember which company made it, but I remember we never saw it again, and it definitely never came out in the US. Thunderbolt on PCs didn’t take off, and plugging a graphics card into a dock only solved half the problem. Driver, BIOS and software work is required to make the laptop and external graphics card work together.
A year ago, at CES 2015, I saw some graphics card docks from Alienware and MSI. These do work! They are real products…but they only work with one or two laptops. The technology is proprietary and expensive.I said they won’t make it unless they’re compatible with more systems because I’m genius (genius can point out very obvious things, right? Please let me have this) and we haven’t heard much about them because
In the end, the Razer Core does it right. It’s a beautiful box with some subtle LED lighting and a black metal chassis. Pull the handle on the back to slide the graphics card tray out for easy installation.
There’s a 500-watt power supply inside, providing plenty of power for just about any suitable high-end GPU (up to 12.2″/310mm). Four USB 3 ports can provide power and transfer data to a connected laptop, and it has an Ethernet port to measure up well. But what’s really exciting is the Thunderbolt 3 connector it uses, in the form of USB Type-C. Thunderbolt 3 supports bandwidths up to 40 Gb/s, and the design is absolutely unpatented. The dream is very close – a single graphics card enclosure that can work with a variety of laptops and turn any portable device into a true gaming champ.
May I? Could such a thing be true? It’s not entirely guaranteed yet, but it looks promising. No special graphics drivers are required to make the system work – you can just use the normal AMD or Nvidia drivers for the GPU placed in the case. One problem is the laptop’s BIOS. According to Razer, the laptop’s BIOS needs to properly support Intel graphics switching so the system can recognize and use the dedicated GPU when plugged in, and run on the integrated GPU when unplugged. Currently, the system only works with the Blade Stealth, but once Core is released, neither Dell, Lenovo, Asus, or anyone else will support the hardware.
With the Blade Stealth, Razer promises it will support hot swapping. You can plug or unplug without restarting the system. If you’re running a game, it will crash on graphics switching, but normal Windows operation will switch normally. They also claim that they didn’t see any sign of performance loss or lag during testing — Thunderbolt’s bandwidth is enough to handle graphics and a few peripherals plugged in.
For really demanding games, a low-power “U”-series Intel CPU paired with a dedicated GPU will be the bottleneck. It’s too early to say whether other laptop makers will support the Core, or if it will work with laptops that already have dedicated GPUs (eg, the Nvidia 970M). However, if the external graphics card dock works, it might be this one.
Razer has yet to finalize a price or release date for the Core, other than to say it will launch in the first half of this year.
Discover more articles in our categories Gaming & News et Anime.
Thanks for visiting we hope our article Razer Core looks like the graphics card shell we’ve been waiting for
, we invite you to share the article on Facebook, pinterest and e-mail with the hashtag ☑️ #Razer #Core #graphics #card #shell #weve #waiting ☑️!
